Gardening

Home Garden – Fenugreek

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I grew the common Fenugreek from seeds that my daughter brought from school. I planted them around an inch deep of moist soil and within days, they sprouted.

Fenugreek
Common Fenugreek

The first few inches of the plant are a bit soft/weak and require some support. The top part is quite rigid and self sufficient.

This plant requires almost no maintenance.

I keep this in direct sunlight.

This plant is a vociferous water drinker and its leaves start drooping if you even miss 1 watering session. I water it between twice a week during peak winters and every day during peak summers. I fertilize it every 2 months or depending on when it shows signs of growth.

Here’re some good tools which will help you with your gardening.

Gardening

Home Garden – My Palms & Dragon Tree

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My Palms are perhaps my most favourite plants of all. As a guy who loves the beach and tropical climates, I find that the Palms bring a bit of the tropical paradise in my home.

Palm
My favourite Palm

This Parlor Palm above is my favourite. It is in good health, growing steadily. I love watching its leaves sway gently in the breeze from my window.

Another Parlor Palm and a Dragon Tree

Shown above is another Parlor Palm on a different balcony along with a Dragon Tree.

These plants require some maintenance, basically only troweling the top soil once in a while, clipping off brown leaves. Although these plants are meant to be kept indoors, I prefer to keep them on my balconies, partly because of space concerns and especially because I love their leaves swaying in the wind.

The first one is kept in partial shade, the other 2 get direct sunlight 3-4 hours in the summers.

I water them between once or twice a week during peak winters and alternate days/everyday during peak summers. I fertilise them every 2 months or depending on when they show signs of growth.

Here’re some good tools which will help you with your gardening.

Gardening

Home Garden – Plant Wall

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I got this expandable plant wall from Amazon. It was relatively cheap and I had an empty wall outside my balcony.

Plant Wall
My Plant Wall

Took me an hour to install, and a quick shopping trip to the nearest nursery to get plants for it.

The top row has 3 Dumbcane plants.

The middle row has 3 Crown of Thorns.

My Money plants

The bottom row has 3 Golden Pothos (A Money plant with light coloured leaves), the middle one also has a Heartleaf Philodendron which is a different variety of money plant with bigger & darker leaves. Also, their tips are a vibrant orange/red before they spout leaves.

All the plants are in partial shade.

All the plants are very low maintenance, but especially the cacti, which require next to no water or maintenance. Still they bloom all year round with pretty little flowers.

I water them all between once a week during peak winters and alternate days during peak summers. For the shrubs, only a few ml at a time.
I fertilise them all once every 2 months.

Next on the list would be to expand it a bit during the summers. Maybe alternate the small and big plants so that the bigger ones get more sunlight.

Here’re some good tools which will help you with your gardening.

Gardening

Home Garden – Foxtail Fern

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The Foxtail Fern is the second most favourite plant I have at home. Here’s a good website with more information about this plant.

Foxtail Fern
My Foxtail Fern

This plant requires almost no maintenance, maybe clipping off yellowing branches once in a while for aesthetics. The most time I have spent on this one is when I transplanted it from a plastic pot to this ceramic one.

I keep this in partial shade.

I water it between once a week during peak winters and alternate days during peak summers. I fertilise it every 2 months or depending on when it shows signs of growth.

Here’re some good tools which will help you with your gardening.

Gardening

I am into Gardening now

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I am officially old; in the last few months, I have grown increasingly interested in gardening, having plants in beautiful pots and watching them grow (most of the time).

There’s nothing as peaceful as watching the fruits of your labour flourish and sway in the wind.

Anyways, below are a few tools I recommend everyone doing casual gardening to have.

  • PictureThis (Plant Identifier) – This is a terrific and useful app which uses Machine Learning to identify plants from their photos. I found the accuracy of this app to be very high. After identifying a particular plant, it shows you information about the plant. It is especially useful when buying new plants because in many instances, I have seen that a seller is not able to explain details about a plant. The basic version is free, but there’s a subscription which allows you unlimited identification and also lets you diagnose plant problems or diseases.
  • Trowel – This is a must have for everyone, is useful for loosening the top soil of plants periodically, mixing fertilisers etc. Buy different sizes depending on the size of your pots and requirements.
A trowel
  • Water Spray – These come in different varieties. You need to fill water, pump the top handle to compress the air inside and then you can use the trigger to spray water out.
Water Spray

Most of these have an adjustable nozzle which can spray a fine mist or shoot a thin jet of water. It is especially useful to spray water on plant leaves (cleaning and moisturising them) or watering smaller pots without making a mess.

More detailed posts coming up.

Rant

Pathetic Fool-2

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It is impossible to go anywhere in Gurgaon (Sorry, Gurugram) without stumbling across such idiots. What a pathetic fool!

German Engineering

This one has a Mercedes Benz logo on his Nissan Sunny. Immediately reminded me of people who put Apple logos on their non-Apple laptops.

I do not understand what people achieve with all this. Maybe there are even bigger fools out there who actually believe that it is a Mercedes/MacBook.

McDonald Drive thru VIP

On closer inspection, it turns out this guy is a McDonald Drive through VIP. I don’t even know what that means. In a drive through queue, when this guy comes along, they remove all the other cars and let him get his Vegeterian burger first?

Education, Motorcycle, Rant

My Worst Purchases-Honda Activa

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So, I was “studying” in my first year of engineering (around the year 2002) in Nagpur and living with 2 of my seniors in a rented apartment. For those not familiar with Nagpur, public transportation was almost non-existent at that time and 95% of the people rode 2-wheelers (Motorcycles, Scooters & Mopeds), remaining 5% had cars.

I had nothing of my own and soon started to feel the heat of wanting to go everywhere but not being able to go anywhere.

I wanted to buy a bike, but the aforementioned jealous roommates didn’t want me to have one, so brainwashed my father into buying me a Honda Activa. I was desperate for anything, so didn’t argue much and greedily accepted it.

The Activa is by no means a bad scooter and it is quite handy for middle age men/women looking for a quick trip to the nearby stores or for kids who are just learning to ride. For a college freshman however, it was the social equivalent of walking around college with “dork” written on the back of his head in Bold letters.

As if the social ridicule wasn’t enough, the scooter was also not suited for a hormone ridden teenager riding around town “trying” to show off and competing with motorcycles. Inherently unstable, it caused me to have numerous accidents within the first few months itself.

Eventually, it was either continuing to ride the monstrosity or drop out of college, so I chose the former and sold it before it had completed one year.

It took 2/3 years, the manliest bike available in India at that time and a year away from college for people to forget I had one.

Technology

My Best Purchases-O2 XPhone II

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This is first of a series where I reminisce about my best purchases and purchases I regret to this date.

I will start with something positive, my second smartphone. The O2 XPhone II, 9th in a long list of phones I have used over the years. Although I did have an N-Gage QD before this, it was barely a smartphone, severely crippled by software.

The O2 XPhone II

The software on the O2 XPhone II was phenomenal. Instead of writing all about it again, I will just link to my original review.

Unfortunately, not all good things last and its joystick broke after a while and was eventually stolen.

This is one of those purchases that changed my life.

Work

Obsession & Burnout

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Last few weeks I have been obsessed with some project at work. It was something I was dreading not doing for some time, but eventually took up because no one else would do it, resulting in burnout.

Now, I am a Network Engineer by profession and this project requires skills in Linux, PHP, Perl etc. so was challenging at first, but eventually I got hooked and it took over my life. Some examples of the madness include

  1. Waking up in the morning anxious to go to office (But not in a good way)
  2. Sitting at my desk for hours without moving
  3. Ignoring all other projects
  4. Not realising it was already night and I have a home
  5. Going home and researching about the project on my phone
  6. Not able to sleep thinking about the project
  7. Having dreams about the project

After 2 weeks now that almost all major challenges are over, I am left spent, exhausted and close to burnout.

Need some time to divert my thoughts to something else.

Rant

Hyundai Creta is the new Suzuki Swift

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There’s a word used in and around Delhi and most of North India. The word is “Lafandar”. It basically refers to a class of teenagers (but could also extend to people in their 30s) who have a lot of free time, whose fathers have a lot of money and whose favourite past time is driving around the streets from evening till late night in their pimped our cars. Also, they do not contribute to society in any way, except by occasionally crushing pedestrians under their cars, keeping this country’s burgeoning population in check.

You can easily spot them at a distance; they are the ones driving aggressively, changing lanes unnecessarily and cutting others off.

Till a few years ago, a vast majority of these “Lafandars” were driving Suzuki Swifts. It never made much sense to me, as the Swift is a middle class car and not a show-off worthy car.

Now that the swift has fallen out of style, most of these people are now driving Hyundai Cretas.

When you spot a Creta at a distance, you can be reasonably sure that if you drive too close to it or overtake it, the owner will cut you off; hence it is best to keep some distance between you and them.